Purpose:
I typically sleep fine. My wife, on the other hand, does not. She tosses and turns, snores, and usually wakes up fatigued. She also refuses to believe me when I tell her she is snoring. She has a Fitbit to track heart rate. But it does not offer anything other beneficial metrics when it comes to sleep. Then, I caught wind of the Withings Sleep Tracking Mat. It monitors heart rate, sleep cycles, and snoring.
Setup:
The device is a small mat with an air bladder. The device unfolders and lays flat between the bottom of the mattress and the box spring. We have a temperpedic memory phone mattress. It is heavy and dense. We were afraid the device would not be able to measure anything through the material. I was afraid it would not be able to detect a heartbeat. It turns out that my worries were unjustified. More on that later.
The device must be installed with the cable facing out. There is a microphone near the cable stem that allows the device to detect snoring. The cable is long enough to reach my closets wall outlet.
I promptly downloaded the Health Mate app from the Apple store, created an account, and connected to the Sleep Mat. The Health Mate app immediately walked me through setup and calibration of the Sleep Mat. Calibration takes approximately ten minutes. At this point I left the cell phone, with the app active, on my bed and left the room. Ten minutes later the Sleep Mat was ready to go.
Experience:
Does it work? The Health Mate app does allow for the connection of other sources of metrics from other health tracking apps/devices such as a smart watch. Unfortunately, I did not see an option to integrate anything other than other Withings products. I would have liked to have integrated the data from a Fitbit or Apple Watch with the Sleep Mat’s data.
My wife has a Fitbit that she uses to track steps and heart rate. We tested the Sleep Mat over the last week while she wore her Fitbit. We compared heart rate metrics from both apps. We found that the heart rate information matched closely between devices. However, the Health Mate graph does not to be a minute by minute chart like the Fitbit tracker is. I found gaps ranging from five to twelve minutes between readings. Is this correct? It may be the interface for the app is incapable of presenting granular information. I cannot believe the device is capture beats per minute using five to twelve minute intervals. I hope Withings fixes this in their app. We were able to match up a few times during her sleeping sessions. We found that the Sleep Mat and Fitbit data did match during their time periods within a beat or two.
Data that my wife and I found interesting are the measurements for light sleep, deep sleep, and REM. This information is represented by a chart showing how intense each sleep cycle is and its duration. You How does it know? I wish there was a clearer explanation than the mat monitors heart rate, respiration rate, sleep cycle, and snoring. It also says it monitors sleep cycles but that seems to be a bucket statement for unspecified metrics that most likely include heart rate and respiration.
Finally, my wife mentioned that the app did not capture the periods breaks in her sleep such as poddy breaks or letting the cat out at 4am. The app does report an unbroken night of sleep for 6, 7, 8 hours. It also gave her a sleep score of 90 or above for each night of sleep. The app does have some rudimentary information regarding what you need to know about sleep. There is zero information about how to interpret the metrics. I also found this disappointing. It makes the device and the metrics more novel than useful. There is a generic coaching portion to the app. The information is not personalized based on metrics.
Final Thoughts:
The device is simple to setup, calibrate, and collect metrics with. It will integrate with other Withings metric collection devices such as their watches. However, there is no education or guidance on how to interpret and then use the information. For example, if the pad detects that I am tossing and turning all night, then identify the pattern for and then give me some suggestions to reduce the activity? Is there an article about anxiety and anxiety relief that may reduce my restless sleeping sessions? Am I getting too much deep sleep? What should I know about sleeping too deeply for too long? Is it a problem? How about snoring four hours a night? There just seems to be a lot missing here that a data driven product should do but does not.
I have the data. What is next? I do not feel like this product has an answer yet. Maybe the capabilities I would find most useful are not part of the mobile app yet. It would great if I could share more detailed data with my doctor while I am with my doctor. I can do that with a smartphone and a more robust mobile app. I like this product, I like the metrics, but I cannot see past the novelty.